Book of the Week: The Long Knives

Irvine Welsh‘s new thriller takes us to a haunted tunnel in Edinburgh

Ray Lennox pulls in a long breath. This fans rather than extinguishes the burning embers in his chest and calves. Fighting past the pain, he forces himself into a steady rhythm. At first it’s galling, then lungs and legs start working together like seasoned lovers rather than first-time daters. The crisp air carries the fresh whip of ozone. In Edinburgh, autumn often seems the default setting, no more than a rogue isobar away. But the towering trees are yet to shed, and weak sunlight dances through a canopy of leaves above him, as he bombs on down the footpath along the river.

Trying to get into Holyrood Park through a warren of backstreets, he comes upon it: the entrance in the car park of an unremarkable housing development of flats. On seeing it, his ears ring, forcing him to stop. He can’t believe it.

This isnae the tunnel . . .

It’s the Innocent Railway Tunnel, completed in 1831. It lies directly beneath Edinburgh University’s Pollock Halls of Residence, yet it’s a secret to most of the students who reside there. He’s an expert on Edinburgh’s tunnels, but has never gone through this one. Stops at its entrance. Ray Lennox knows that it isn’t the one in Colinton Mains, where he was attacked as a young boy, a tunnel, now bedizened in a gaudy art, that he’s walked through scores of times since.

You don’t scare me.

But this one does. More than their source at Colinton, this dark, narrow passageway evokes these terrible memories. He knows that despite its name, numerous deaths – including those of two children in the 1890s – have taken place in this tunnel.

Lennox can’t go on. Feels his legs quivering.

It’s only a fucking cycle path, he thinks, noting the bollards and mesh fencing stacked at the side of the tunnel mouth. They are about to do some work. He’s read that there’s maintenance planned.

Yet the grown man cannot enter the dimly lit tunnel in which the light – and liberation – at the end feel like a lifetime away. It snakes into the oblivion Lennox knows will swallow him. This one will not let him go. The eerie sensation in the thickening, gelid air, a force field that he cannot breach. His ears ring. He turns and storms back out onto the main road. Starts accelerating again, trying to outrun his shame, first to the Meadows, heading to Tolcross, astonished as to why someone who can look at dead bodies, into the eyes of killers and the haunted family members of their victims without flinching, wondering how such a man cannot run through a tunnel. He cries out, trying to banish the intrusive thoughts from his head. Circling round, not knowing where he’s going, he comes upon the Union Canal, and sprints down a section of towpath, passing his local pub, run by Jake Spiers, Edinburgh’s most obnoxious publican, before returning breathless to his second-floor flat in Viewforth. Here the Victorian tenements look disdainfully at the showy new-build waterfront homes and offices that will never outlast them.

Collapsing onto his built-in window seat, Lennox lets his lungs settle. He thought he had proven to be the master of his fears. The Innocent Tunnel wasn’t even the guilty one. Yet he looks in trembling reassurance at the Miami Marlins baseball bat that he keeps in the corner by the door, for security purposes.

Why is this shit coming back?

This extract is from Irvine Welsh’s new book The Long Knives.

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